Books & Things

Crosswords in Bangalore. Pic courtesy:Kishore

This last post reminded me how much I rue the fact that Sri Lanka doesn't have good book stores. The Vijitha Yapa is not really a book store, it's a small book-shop. There's no place to just chill, read a few pages of the book you want to buy while you sip a cup of coffee.What's my ideal book store? It should have preferabaly, the following:

• Lots of books (duh! - but a good collection of politics/econ books is a must and for that to hapen your book store must be large) 
• Comfy places to sit around and read, your book store should double as a sort of a library.
• Coffee.
• Wi-fi or a way in which you can read reviews. (same goes for my ideal DVD-store)
• Some things other than books -- DVDs, and other little 'things' you can buy (not essential really, but good business stratergy)

Sady, I haven't found this place yet. The closest I've been to something like this is Books & Things, in Gurgaon, in one of the malls.Gurgaon is this up and coming place just outside of Delhi. Fun place. the store didn't have any coffee or internet, but it had almost everything else right. In fact, India is a good place for book-people. Not only can you find pirated books on the street, if you are someone on a student-budget, but you'd find places like Books & Things or Crosswords. For all the Hindi-movies/Soaps they copy, I wish a few Sri Lankans copied some of that.

There maybe reasons for this though, India (according to some) has the world's largest English speaking population. With 350 million speakers, that's more than the combined populations of the U.S., U.K, Canada and Australia put together. Sri Lanka's whole population is about 20 million, about the same as Mumbai's total population. Fortunately or unfortunately, laws of demand and supply apply to everything. But then again, given all those coffee houses and up-market cafe's, I'm sure there is a market for a decent book store.

On The Logic of Life (A review)

Ever since Stevens, Levitt and Dubner broke into the scene with their enormously popular Freakonomics, there has been a multitude of popular economics books. Books that uses the tools of economics -- the study of incentives, laws of supply and demand, trade-offs -- and apply them to everyday life. The result is often a fun, counterintuitive explanation of how the world works. Dubner and Levitt's most memorable contribution being attributing the decreasing crime rates in the U.S. to legalizing abortion.

Tim Harford wrote the first of these pop. econ. books -- the undercover economist. A popular book among economics students, perhaps not so much outside the discipline. With his latest work, The Logic of Life : the rational economics of an irrational world, Harford takes on the mainstream.

If you are interested in finding out why your boss is overpaid, why racism is still persistent or why teenage girls are increasingly giving blow jobs to their boyfriends, this book is for you.

Fundamental to Harford's book, is rational choice theory. His argument is not so much that “people are always and everywhere rational”. He admits they aren't. His contention is that people are "rational nearly enough and often enough" to make rational choice, a useful framework to understand the world. "Earth isn't a perfect sphere", writes Harford, "But it's nearly a sphere, and for many purposes the simplification that the Earth is a spherical will do nicely."

If you are thinking Harford imagines human beings as absolutely rational beings, along the lines of the infamous "homo economious" or the "economic man" capable of sophisticated reasoning, you are wrong. Harford is deeply aware that human beings are motivated by all kinds of human emotions. He writes, "These motivations are not financial, and not always selfish -- but our responses to them are national. As any teenager will remind you, no less planning, calculating, strategizing goes on about maters of heart than about the matters of the wallet."

Harford surveys the the work of number of economists, experiments involving human beings to lab rats, and data involving house prices to blow-job rates to answer the most interesting of questions. Why do more women live in the cities? why do racial minorities self-segregate? Why do voters choose bad politicians? and why do more and more teenage girls go down on their boyfriends? To all of this, there is a rational answer.

Ask that last question from any Sri Lankan TV-intellectual and they would give the standard western-culture-destroying-our-culture explanation. Social scientists might similarly offer more sophisticated versions of the same story. Ask an economist (or at least Tim Harford) and the explanation is simple. The American "blow job epidemic", according to Harford, is a rational response to changing incentives. When costs or benefits of something change, people change their behavior. Thanks to sex education, many teenagers (at least in the U.S.) know that regular sex has real risks -- they are much more aware of not just about the risk of pregnancy, but the risks associated with sexually transmitted diseases which comes with penetrative sex. Comparatively, oral sex has less risks or as Harford puts it, "The costs of oral sex are, quite simply, lower than the costs of regular sex". Teenage girls weigh these costs and benefits -- not always consciously -- before going down on their boyfriends. The result is while the rate of penetrative sex among teenagers in the U.S. is going down, the popularity of oral sex is on the rise.

The Logic of Life, is full of this type of fun and provoking ways of explaining things based on hard data. You might think that much of the stories in the book doesn't apply to places like Sri Lanka. Certainly, some of it doesn't, but a lot of it, (especially the chapter about "rational racism" and politics) does. Harford's logic of life is smart, well-written and a joy to read. I you liked Freakonomics, you'll love this one. Even if you didn't, you'll still like it.

For more (admittedly better) reviews, visit the Book's website. Harford, like many economists of this genre maintains an engaging blog, which I read often. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the book in Sri Lanka as yet. You can order it from amazon. For some excerpts from the chapter about love and marriage, see this slate article.

Who is John Galt? (the movie)

According to Cato's blog, the movie of Any Rand's Atlas Shrugged is finally set to start shooting later this year.

Scott Holleran at Box Office Mojo is all over the Atlas Shrugged movie project. A few days ago he talked to Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate, the studio that is planning to make the film. He confirmed that Angelina Jolie will star as Dagny Taggart. Burns says John Galt should not be played by a movie star but by an actor with “an incredibly remarkable face, a face that just pops out at you,” to which his Randian interviewer responds, “A face with no fear, no pain, no guilt?”

Read the whole thing.

I have read both Atlas Shrugged and Rand's other acclaimed work, fountainhead. I appreciate the contributions Rand has made and accept part of her philosophy of objectivism, but I find some of it repulsive. Particularly objectivism's modern day interpretations like the stuff dished out by the Ayn Rand Institute.

Anyway, the book is a good read and I look forward to seeing the movie.

God is a Republican, Santa is a Democrat

I find myself least busy at exam times. i shut down - say no to kottu-parties, meetings, etc. and stay home with the noble intention of 'studying'. Instead, i find myself drifting away to useless blog-readeing, blogging, and all those books I haven't read..

one of them is Parliament of Whores by P.J O'Rourke. it's a brilliantly funny book and here's a great quote :

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get invited into God's heavenly
country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He's cute. He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he's famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus

India Unbound: An attempt at a review

I finished reading the book a few weeks ago, and I’m officially declaring it as one of my favorites. I’m sure many great men and women have reviewed this book much more objectively and eloquently than I could ever hope for. So this is not going to be your traditional review, in fact I’m not quite sure what this is; just that I thought the book at the very least deserved a blog post.

Apart from my own, there are two nations that have always captured my imagination - one is the United States and the other is India. The latter perhaps more than the former, possibly because of my closer interaction with it – travel, friends and of course NDTV. This book relates the story of India, from its independence to its time under the ‘mixed economy’ and finally to economic liberalization and beyond.

Gurcharan Das, the author of India Unbound is a former CEO of P&G India and a Harvard educated scholar who grew up almost with post-independent India. The book is part memoir, part economic analysis and part political history all compiled into an engaging as well an insightful book about India. The thesis of the book can be summarized as follows:

After India won its independence from the British, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru started building a nation based on secularism, democracy and socialism. Nehru being infatuated by the then Soviet Union introduced the ‘third way’ supposed to combine the best of socialism and capitalism, but ended up combining the worst features of both. In combining democracy with socialism the Indian state quickly degenerated into a license-raj and a massive bureaucracy which lead to corruption and suppression of millions of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Few, like Dhirubhai Ambani’s managed to beat the system, and use it to their advantage. But for every success, there were thousands who failed. After years of struggle, and faced with a financial crisis and a change of government, India opened up its economy in 1991. Unshackling itself from the self-imposed chains and controls and ever since has put itself towards a path of rapid economic growth especially helped by the global information age.

It’s a wonderful story of how reforms can bring about such profound changes, and the lunacies of command and control economics. He takes a very personal approach citing examples he himself has experienced, conversations he had, and the situations he had to face as a manager and a businessman. The book often diverts its attention to societal analysis, governance and sometimes even management advice, but somehow all of it manages to fit well with the overall narrative.

It’s an optimistic take on India. Some have criticized the book for this feature and how it doesn’t present a ‘balanced view’ of India. But as Das himself has said, it’s not supposed to be a scholarly work; it’s a book, the story of India seen by one Gurcharan Das. Some of his optimism, particularly with regard to the IT-based services has not materialized but by and large, the thesis of the book remains strong especially against the backdrop of India’s current progress.

I wish some of the Sri Lankan policy makers and even some Sri Lankan newspaper editors take a look at the book. India Unbound: from Independence to the Global Information Age – A must read!

Gurcharan Das maintains a blog here.

Creative Commons Controversy

Seth Godin’s blog is one of my favorites. His short, concise thoughts and observations in a webby entrepreneurial point of view, makes for a good read most times.

Today though, he has a post on how a one of his books titled “Everyone’s an Expert” available free online , is now published and sold, it’s available on Amazon, without his explicit consent.

The consent however, was implicit. When Seth originally published the book online, he chose a Creative Commons (CC) license (for the unenlightened, this is a form of licensing that allows content creators to giveaway certain rights so only ‘some’ rights are reserved.). Within CC licenses, there are types which disallow commercial usage of CC licensed content, but the one Seth chose makes what the publisher doing -at least at first glance - completely legal.

The publisher is essentially selling the service of making available a book in printed hardcopy. they are not really selling the product per se, but rather selling the service of providing the product, an enhanced delivery system if you will, from online PDF to delivered paperback. At $10, it’s not a bad deal.

A question can be raised as to whether the publisher should acknowledge the book is available online? The answer is no. The publisher is essentially a competing with the free provision of the book, and it doesnt make sense for them to promote the 'free book', much same way Yahoo doesn’t have to acknowledge that Google is the better search engine.

At this point, I would like to skip the part about ethics. Wouldn’t it have been nice if the publisher got permission from Mr.Godin? Of course! But that’s arbitrary. What if, Seth, as is likely to happen in this case, asked the publisher not to publish his work, Should the publisher oblige? I don’t necessarily think so.

This paves way to raise a few pertinent issues, not only regarding this particular case but regarding Creative Commons (and other copyleft) licensing in general.

• Can a content creator later change his/her mind about the choice of license?
• If the license is revoked what will happen to the re-used content using the liberties of the previous license? What if for example, a publisher re-published a work previously under CC license without the knowledge that the license has been revoked?
• Are there, implicit limitations that content re-users are unaware of? For example, Seth in his post hints that by using his name, the publishers may be violating trademark law.

Creative Commons and similar initiatives are necessary instruments for content creators to survive and profit in the integrated world we live in, it is incidents such as this, which would further strengthen the creative copyright model.

At the end of the day what people have to understand is this: Commons are creative, but nobody said they were nice.